Opening Cutscene

Motivation

For playing cutscenes, UDK requires using the Bink format and its native player. However, as students with no native code access, UDK’s Bink player has a major downside: the only play function is an exec command called MOVIETEST.

The MOVIETEST function loads the movie and then stops the engine completely to play it. This means that the cutscenes are unskippable (input has been stopped) and can’t have subtitles (the message system is also stopped.) Our team believed that lacking those two features in our cutscene would make for a bad player experience, so we made a custom cutscene player in flash to fix this problem.

Design

Our flash file template for cutscenes is devised of four layers:

An object that watches for button presses and fires an event to Unreal on any button press to end the cutscene.

A text container that is used to display subtitle data on top of the cutscene.